hi all, just wondering what version of linux is best to download and install..i know nothing about linux whatsoever but i wanna try it.so whats best for a p3 450mhz with 384mb of ram thanx keltik

Kinda of a loaded question, there are so many different flavors to choose from some can fit on just 1 floppy while other distros will have evrything but the kitchen sink, I tarted with Mandrake but now have found Fedora Core 3 to meet all my needs. If all you are looking to do is get a feel for Linux you may want to take a look at Knoppix, it will fit on just 1 CD rom and if your bios will allow booting from the CD you wont even need a hard drive as it loads everything into memory and runs from there, have heard of alot of people that will use Knoppix to trouble shoot a failed windows platform as well as using it to copy files from a windows machine that cant even boot. You may just want to Google for linux downloads and poke around a bit to see what is out there and to your liking, one thing that you may want to consider is the desktop enviorment, many to choose from there but it seems to me that KDE and GNOME have become the most popular, get ready for a ride there is so much out there and best of all is the price $00.00 http://www.knoppix.org/ http://fedora.redhat.com/ "Linux" the LAST service patch any window$ platform will ever need! :) Keep the old stuff running

I'd recomend MEPIS or Knoppix since they are both very user friendly and can both be ran from the CD as well as installed to the hard drive. They are also both only a single CD download. Although it's mainly a matter of personal preference, any of the top distros would do, Mandrake, SUSE, Fedora etc. You might want to consider buying a boxed version so you get a manual.

Ditto above. Ubuntu is another distro which seems to be quite popular. They will ship out CDs to you for FREE too, one live CD (NB performance of live CDs like knoppix is not as fast as a hard drive install unless you have lots of memory [1Gb+] to load the CD into when booting) and the other CD for a hard drive install once you have decided you like the live one. I would definitely recommend buying at least one big distro. It saves time downloading ISOs, sometimes (like suse) the boxed version may contain commercial stuff which is not legally available in a download version, the manuals will be invaluble to you and it also supports the GNU/Linux community. Visit www.distrowatch.com to compare distros, download some from www.linuxiso.org, try them out and then choose one to go out and buy....it still works out a fraction of the price M$ charge for an operating system!

3Dave has just reminded me of something, If you'd like to try a live CD distro with good performance Damn Small Linux is small enough to run in the amount of RAM you have. I think you just type "DSL toram" at the boot prompt to load it into RAM. You can also run DSL from a USB mem stick or even from within windows although performance in windows is poor.

Slax (based on slackware, my personal favourite) is also a small live distro which may fit into your RAM...I know knoppix needs ~750Mb+ There are several versions of slax aimed at different uses (multimedia box, a server or workstation, running windoze apps etc) and the downloads range from 41Mb to 202Mb NB most live CD distros can also be installed to your hard drive once booted. http://slax.linux-live.org/

Just for the record from the Knoppix web site # Intel-compatible CPU (i486 or later), # 32 MB of RAM for text mode, at least 96 MB for graphics mode with KDE (at least 128 MB of RAM is recommended to use the various office products), # bootable CD-ROM drive, or a boot floppy and standard CD-ROM (IDE/ATAPI or SCSI), # standard SVGA-compatible graphics card, # serial or PS/2 standard mouse or IMPS/2-compatible USB-mouse. I have never had a problem with low memory even with machines down to 32 meg.... Keep the old stuff running